If you follow SilverlightShow news or our Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn accounts, you know that since the beginning of this week you may already read our news, articles, events, and set reminders for our webinars directly from your Windows Phone, using SilverlightShow WP application (search the marketplace for 'silverlightshow', or use this link to get the app:
http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=aa47a1d4-3418-496d-862f-36eb1ec78f43
Peter Kuhn who is the author of the application, a recognized SilverlightShow article author, webinar presenter and ebook author will use this application as the showcase in his upcoming article series on building a Windows Phone app from start to end.
What is Peter's motivation behind authoring such an article series?
"When you look around the web and blog posts, you can see that 90+% of all articles are about a single topic of Windows Phone programming, a single API or isolated aspect. Even when you find article series, they rarely are about developing a single application, but rather often only connected in a loose way, and still only focus on the technical aspects. What's often missing is guidance to deeper topics, like how to put all the details together to make an application really work in a good way. People often struggle with "the big picture", because there's way less information out there on best practices for things like these, whereas anybody can dig up usually a hundred posts about specific tiny technical problems in Google or Bing at any time. So my vision would be to convey the whole process to SilverlightShow readers.
These articles will also contain technical details, and even code, for interesting parts of the implementation, but in general they will rather focus on questions like "why" and "what" instead of "how". It's one thing to for example write an article on how to create a live tile on Windows Phone. But it's another thing to demonstrate to the reader why you should to decide for a live tile (as opposed to other alternatives, e.g. toasts), or when you should do that (and when not). What data is suitable for live tiles and what isn't. Explain what a good decision process looks like. Provide real world experience that also talks about things people bump into eventually which are seldom discussed in more theoretical, "hallo world" articles.
Expect the first article from the series within the next week or so! Meanwhile, enjoy SilverlightShow Windows Phone app, and feel free to leave feedback on it!
You are also welcome to suggest, below this news, any specific question you would like covered in this article series.